Jon Hamm looked great last night at the premiere of Jonathan Tropper’s Your Friends & Neighbours, premiering on Apple TV+ on Friday. It’s about a successful hedge fund manager who gets fired and ends up stealing from people in his neighbourhood. Amanda Peet plays his wife and his character is having an affair with Olivia Munn.
There have been comparisons to Breaking Bad but with rich people in upstate New York instead of New Mexico. The homes are bigger, glossier, the people have better hair, and it’s not drugs, it’s designer watches and artwork. Season two is already confirmed, though, so we’ll have multiple seasons of Jon Hamm’s descent or reclamation.
And this is Jon’s first leading role in a television series since Mad Men, though probably not for lack of opportunity. I like the choices he’s made since Don Draper. He’s an excellent character actor, his ego isn’t so big that he won’t take supporting roles – and he’s taken so many of them in the decade or so since Mad Men ended that it feels exciting to see him back on top of the call sheet.
Jon is considered part of the Saturday Night Live family, he cameos often, he’s invited to all the events, he was part of the 50th anniversary special, but he actually hasn’t hosted Saturday Night Live since the Mad Men days and he returns as host to 8H this Saturday. Jon is never bad on SNL, I’m excited.
Fittingly, given his relationship to the show, it was Tina Fey who interviewed him for Interview. The photo shoot is hilarious – scroll through this carousel, it’s so random and weird and also there’s a quote board in here that we need to talk about.
Jon and Tina’s conversation is an example of why it’s often dull AF when celebrities interview other celebrities. They’ve known each other forever. They work together often. There’s almost nothing here, like Tina even says out loud, twice, “what else do I want to ask you”, and it reads like boredom, like she’s not that into it because there’s no curiosity here, at least no curiosity that she’s willing to pursue in the pages of a magazine. So, for the most part, I don’t find the interview all that insightful. Except for when they seem to forget that it’s an interview – one short exchange that sounds as close to what their off-camera conversations might sound like. It happens when Jon’s talking about caring less about how he looks:
HAMM: Well, no, I’m not trying to say that. I was so much more worried about that stuff in my twenties and thirties. Now I’m like, “Who gives a sh-t?” I’m not trying to win any kind of body-conscious race. That race is over, and Mark Wahlberg won.
FEY: With the help of Jesus.
HAMM: Jesus and his golf friends.
Tina’s quip “with the help of Jesus” is spontaneous, I can almost hear her saying it, and Jon follows her lead. I read it as a dig – and to be clear, I’m not laughing at the dig because of Jesus, this is not about faith, it’s about Mark Wahlberg’s performance of faith and how over the last few years, the focus of his career has been faith-based content, most recently with Mel Gibson who also, um, took the same turn. And if you recall, this is a man who earlier on in his life committed hate crimes, and then later in life tried to erase the history of those hate crimes when he requested a pardon because something something something it was an issue for his business even though at this point he’d basically become a mogul.
So when Tina says “with the help of Jesus”, she’s not mocking Jesus, she’s mocking people like Mark who reinvent themselves behind Jesus as a way of distancing themselves from the realities of their past without truly and meaningfully reckoning with that past and, more importantly, the communities who were harmed by it.
That, for me, was the highlight of the interview. And I appreciate it!
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